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We introduce an extension of Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming (SDDP) to solve stochastic convex dynamic programming equations. This extension applies when some or all primal and dual subproblems to be solved along the forward and…

We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem modeled as an unknown MDP with an absorbing state. We propose PSRL-SSP, a simple posterior sampling-based reinforcement learning…

In this paper we propose two algorithms in the tabular setting and an algorithm for the function approximation setting for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. SSP problems form an important class of problems in Reinforcement…

This paper is about operator-theoretic methods for solving nonlinear stochastic optimal control problems to global optimality. These methods leverage on the convex duality between optimally controlled diffusion processes and…

This paper studies duality and optimality conditions in general convex stochastic optimization problems introduced by Rockafellar and Wets in 1976. We derive an explicit dual problem in terms of two dual variables, one of which is the…

We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…

We consider a generic empirical composition optimization problem, where there are empirical averages present both outside and inside nonlinear loss functions. Such a problem is of interest in various machine learning applications, and…

We consider the Scenario Convex Program (SCP) for two classes of optimization problems that are not tractable in general: Robust Convex Programs (RCPs) and Chance-Constrained Programs (CCPs). We establish a probabilistic bridge from the…

This paper formulates algorithms to upper-bound the maximum Value-at-Risk (VaR) of a state function along trajectories of stochastic processes. The VaR is upper bounded by two methods: minimax tail-bounds (Cantelli/Vysochanskij-Petunin) and…

This paper considers the problem of minimizing an expectation function over a closed convex set, coupled with a {\color{black} functional or expectation} constraint on either decision variables or problem parameters. We first present a new…

We develop a general theory of convex duality for certain singular control problems, taking the abstract results by Kramkov and Schachermayer (1999) for optimal expected utility from nonnegative random variables to the level of optimal…

Vertex Subset Problems (VSPs) are a class of combinatorial optimization problems on graphs where the goal is to find a subset of vertices satisfying a predefined condition. Two prominent approaches for solving VSPs are dynamic programming…

Most inverse problems from physical sciences are formulated as PDE-constrained optimization problems. This involves identifying unknown parameters in equations by optimizing the model to generate PDE solutions that closely match measured…

In this paper, we revisit the problem of Differentially Private Stochastic Convex Optimization (DP-SCO) in Euclidean and general $\ell_p^d$ spaces. Specifically, we focus on three settings that are still far from well understood: (1) DP-SCO…

We look at a stochastic time-varying optimization problem and we formulate online algorithms to find and track its optimizers in expectation. The algorithms are derived from the intuition that standard prediction and correction steps can be…

We study the problem of learning in the stochastic shortest path (SSP) setting, where an agent seeks to minimize the expected cost accumulated before reaching a goal state. We design a novel model-based algorithm EB-SSP that carefully skews…

This study investigates leveraging stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to learn operators between general Hilbert spaces. We propose weak and strong regularity conditions for the target operator to depict its intrinsic structure and…

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…

On solving a convex-concave bilinear saddle-point problem (SPP), there have been many works studying the complexity results of first-order methods. These results are all about upper complexity bounds, which can determine at most how many…